If you decorate your house yourself, you will likely need to remove wallpaper at some point in your life. Having a steamer makes the process easy, but it’s not worth buying one to use only once. This article will explain how to remove wallpaper when you don’t have a wallpaper steamer.
MATERIALS & TOOLS REQUIRED
Materials
- Water
Tools
- Spray bottle/ sponge
- Scraper
STEP 1: REMOVE LOOSE PAPER
The first step to removing wallpaper is to use a sharp scraper to ‘flick’ up a bit of wallpaper from the wall. Then pull on this loose corner to get off as big of a piece as possible.
You may find that sometimes a wallpaper sheet may come off really easily and in full. At other times, you will try to pull it and barely anything will be removed. It really depends on the quality and quantity of the wallpaper glue used, the surface material underneath the wallpaper and how long it has been on the wall.
STEP 2: WET THE REMAINING WALLPAPER
For any wallpaper that is stuck to the wall and you can’t remove easily with the scraper, use a spray bottle filled with water or a wet sponge to wet the patch. Leave it wet for about 10 minutes. The water will soak through the paper and loosen the wallpaper glue.
STEP 3: USE A SHARP SCRAPER TO SCRAPE OFF THE WET WALLPAPER
Once the wallpaper has softened after the soak, use your sharp scraper to remove the wallpaper. It should scrape off easily, with minimal scraping. Note that if you have lots of wallpaper layers on top of each other or the wallpaper glue is particularly strong, you may need to repeat these 2 steps multiple times. Give it a try scraping after each soak and if it doesn’t come off, add more water and soaking time. Also check out the tips below for what you can add into the water to help dissolve glue quicker.
TIPS
- Minimise the scraping – scraping the wallpaper off hard can damage your wall. This is ok if you’re planning on plastering, plasterboarding, wallpapering or jointing the wall after. However, if you would like to paint the wall after removing the wallpaper, try to avoid hard scraping so that you don’t end up with gauges in the wall.
- For really stubborn wallpaper glue try mixing a bit of washing up liquid and baking soda into the water. This should help dissolve the glue quicker than pure water.
THE RESULT
The result should be wallpaper-free walls. If you did end up having to scrape hard, you may have got some damage to cover. You may be able to just fill the issues with filler and paint over them. Unfortunately, quite often, wallpaper is hiding bigger damage to walls such as cracks so it’s unlikely that you can get away with painting straight over the wall. In this case, you may need to consider plastering, plasterboarding, jointing or wallpapering over the wall.
With our walls, we made quite a bit of damage removing decorative wooden mouldings and as you can see, the walls also have quite a lot of cracks running through them. We ended up patch plastering the bigger holes and using jointing compound over the entire room to fill and hide the cracks.
